


That Awful Rush To Say Goodbye

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: F/M, Other, Pining, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 02:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16466579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: Hope is what kills you. Kitty knows that. Bartimaeus, somehow, is still learning.





	That Awful Rush To Say Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lysandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysandra/gifts).



> uhhh no proofreading we die like men.
> 
> ok i'm gonna be real a significant portion of this was written in one wild rush to get it done before the deadline, so please forgive any rough patches with the writing. that being said, it was incredibly interesting to explore bartkitty for the first time. i hope i did the prompt justice?

It had been one year, three months, and seven days since the demon rebellion nearly brought London--and maybe all of Britain, maybe the world--to its knees. One year, three months, seven days, eight hours, and fifteen minutes since John Mandrake--Nathaniel--had died ending it. One year and some change since the ruling class of Great Britain had been wiped out nearly to a man, leaving behind the powerless nobodies behind the erstwhile ruling class and the starving, unhappy masses to piece the country back together again. The result had not been the utopia that the people had once dreamed of, it was not perfect or even remotely close, but--it wasn’t hellish, either. People were learning to respect one another, to belay the hierarchy and to hear opinions from people unlike themselves. They didn’t have a choice. To move forward, this was what the country would have to become.

Sometimes, Kitty Jones would watch this gruelling, thankless process, each step forward preceded by three steps back, and see in it the efforts of her friends--of Anne, Gladys, Fred, Mr. Pennyfeather. The others. This was what they had been fighting for, was it not? The magicians were mostly powerless (those who even lived to know the craft being weak and timid, frightened to their core and the very thought of actually stepping into another pentacle, after everything they had ever been told regarding the nature of demons had been proven true), and the commoners had a significant representation in the new parliament. The resistance had been naive and fruitless, but ultimately, at least one of them--at least Kitty--had lived to see the new world they dreamed of. Sometimes, Kitty took great joy--great pride, more importantly--when she sat in on the negotiations over new legislation, new courts, new everything, because none of this, none of it had ever been done before, not here--they were doing, building, something unprecedented. Some days, as she listened to and occasionally mediated between the few remaining magicians and her people, the common people (mediated only; she had refused an actual seat at this table from the start, had never wanted to dip her toes into the world of politics, to taste that power, not when she was a woman of action, not when the role of the politician involved occupying a stifling space and speaking a language she was never taught), Kitty’s heart swelled with what had been accomplished, and what still had the chance to be.

Today was not one of those days.

As Kitty Jones watched the beautiful machination of the process she had helped to start take motion, she wanted nothing more but to bash her own head in--that, at least, would be less painful than continuing to listen to the idiots around her squabble over meaningless details and frivolous arguments.

The chamber today consisted of Martin Francis-Jacobs, the de facto leader of the commoners’ faction, and the three most powerful magicians remaining in the country (pompous assholes, the lost of them, for all that they had been clerks and secretaries before Nouda and the others had devoured every magician of any promise)--an impossibly skinny woman with a nervous tick called Renee Peters, a man Kitty had heard referred to as charismatic but who came off only as self-aggrandizing and stupid named Rocco Marx, and a braindead fixture who had et to get a word in edgewise, and whose name Kitty was unsure of. Kitty had been invited here, a to every other meeting she was called to, because she was a bit of a war hero, because she was the only person in London, so far as anyone could tell, who had been raised a commoner but still knew the intricacies of summoning, and because, truth be told, if it weren’t for her, the entire damn government would have pulled itself to pieces months ago.

She has the biggest migraine of her life. Aging forty years in one go, ripping herself from her body and then being mercilessly stuffed back--none of that held a candle to this mind numbing pain.

“--Just  _ saying  _ that a new capitol building built nearer to the common sector might send the wrong message. Doesn’t it feel--encroaching? The historic capitol has a legacy, it’s a perfectly fine location for new legislative action to begin, a new government for the people, of course, always the people….”

“What you’re proposing, Marx, is to build up the new order using the face of the old. I don’t think I’m only speaking for myself when I say that your intentions seem good enough, but what you’re clearly implying is that you want the people to be reminded of the previous dynasty, and you can see how those implications might be troubling--we need a new face. I can’t be alone in this.”

Kitty, on principle, wanted to like the commoners’ president. He was, in a way, the symbol of every good thing that the revolution had wrought. The thing was, though, that it would be much easier to like him if he weren’t so goddamn _ annoying. _

“If I may--Mr. Jacobs--”

“Francis-Jacobs.”

“Of course. Mr. Francis-Jacobs, you make a good point, of course no one wants to rule through the memory of the old order, or through fear. But where do you propose we even  _ put _ the new capitol, if not for in the ashes of the old one?”

The aforementioned Francis-Jacobs drummed his fingers over the table. He had clearly been anticipating this question--dreading it, apparently. Letting out a huff of air, he averted his eyes when he spoke: “The historical site of the Glass Palace?”

“Oh, you must be joking--”

“Sir. Be reasonable.”

The room exploded into a vicious three person argument, with Francis-Jacobs, Marx, and Peters dancing on the edge of what could be considered enough fake-politeness for a politician and the still-silent man Kitty had yet to identify (even if she had been told his name, she’s sure she wouldn’t be able to remember it) squirming uncomfortably in his chair. 

It took every ounce of self control that Kitty had ever possessed to not slam her head into the table in front of her. Repeatedly.

Unfortunately, not beginning such a spectacle gave the idiots a reason to involve her in the fools’ debate currently breaking out around her. It was only a matter of time, she supposed, until they remembered her existence. It was too much to ask to think she could have flown under the radar until a convenient excuse to leave appeared.

In the end, it was Renee who damned her.

“Wait, wait. Let’s ask Mrs.--er,  _ Miss _ Jones. Kathleen, you were involved personally with the Glass Palace incident, no? Would you not think it an insult to those who gave their lives protecting the city to build up an elaborate parliamentary building over their tombs?”

Kitty had a few guidelines for life post-everything. She did not let herself exert effort the way she used to, because it would probably kill her. She did not think of visiting her parents. She never walked near graveyards or the remains of the Glass Palace, and when she passed a spirit in the street (she could always tell these days, her eyes naturally attuned to it, though what it was that pointed them out to her, she couldn’t say), she did not linger around it. More than anything else, though, she did not think about the particulars of the demon rebellion.

She did not think about  _ them. _

“I--uh.”

“Ms. Peters, you’re thinking far too narrowly. It would be built to honor them--an elaborate tomb. Every day we went into work, we would be thanking them, in a way, for their sacrifice.”

“No  _ offense, _ Mr. Francis-Jacobs, but what do you know about their sacrifice? Ms. Jones is the one who knew, well, him, and you cut her off.”

Great.

“We weren’t particularly close,” Kitty mumbled, wishing she were anywhere but there.

“But--you did know him, right? You knew Mandrake.”

“I knew the boy who died in the Glass Palace. Yes.” Her speech was getting stilted as she became more and more uncomfortable. In her mind, Kitty was thinking of ways to escape, 101 routes to the exit that she could take and get away from this horrid meeting. Taking them would more than likely break her rule about exertion, but who cared--she had already had her cardinal rule broken by force.

“You know, I used to work for a close contemporary of Mandrake,” Marx shared conspiritally. “I heard some things about him… well. He was a hero, no doubt a hero, but I also think he was somewhat of an… odd sort.”

Peters darted her eyes from Kitty (who was doing her best to hold a mask of stoicism to hide any feelings one way or another about the way this conversation was unfolding in front of her) back to Marx. Her curiosity, evidently, won out over her courtesy.

“Odd?”

“Well, yes--his relationship with his slaves--they were a tad, how you say,  _ unhealthy.” _

This last bit was dropped into a whisper, and they were out of the gates. Once these magicians started their gossip, even if it was gossip about a man--a boy, he really was a boy--who was widely regarded as a national hero these days, there was no stopping them. Even the mute lump taking up space at the end of the table seemed intrigued.

“No!” 

“Yes! My boss, Farrar--the most promising of the young government, next in line to be the PM, I’m told--well. She hung around him often enough, because he was the council’s little pet, wasn’t he? Talented. But one thing sticks out in particular. There was a party--a dinner party. The two of them were waiting on valuable intel from one of his servants, and the blasted thing eschews all subtlety and breaks in with a huge commotion, halfway dying. Any sane magician would give it the essence rack, at the very least. Do you know what this child does?”

“I can’t even fathom.”

“He dismisses it. Saves its life--before he got the information out of it. From what Farrar said, there was a codependency issue there. It’s--well, it’s not right, is it?”

On the other side of the table, Francis-Jacobs, who had nothing more than passing knowledge on what any of that meant, seemed to be squirming, out of his depth. Across from him, Kitty couldn’t try to fish him out, because she herself had frozen as the implications of the tacky gossip sunk in.

He dismissed Bartimaeus then.

_ What if…. _

“Ms. Jones? You’re looking a little green--”

“Excuse me.”

Rising as abruptly as she could manage, Kitty clambered for the door and made it, blessedly, to the powder room before her sudden onset nausea took over and she wretched (dry heaved) into the toilet. All told, it was probably the least enjoyable memory she had ever made in the building, and after countless hours of bickering and boredom, that was saying a lot.

There was a reason she never thought about them. After only being acquainted with Mandrake for a total of a few days, all in all, and only really understanding him for hours if that, there was no reason for her to think back so fondly on him, no matter what they had gone through together. No logical reason. And Bartimaeus, too--they had shared one day, really just one day of dazzling purpose, she had given up everything for him, not least her health, but that couldn’t diminish the fact that it had been one day over a year ago (one year, three months, seven days, who’s counting anymore?), couldn’t diminish the fact that they were dead, and she was alive, and she had to deal with the fallout on her own. It wouldn’t do to spend all of her time wondering what might have been, or what the djinni would think of this development, or what Nathaniel would do if he saw the sorry state of the magicians in the new government. Doing that would drive her mad, because wondering about the thoughts of dead men was a quick way to start hearing them, and then where would she be? Her mind hadn’t been touched by her visit to the Other Place, but if she started dwelling on the end (if she dwelt on being the only person alive who knew the truth about what had happened, if she dwelt on the broken promises she couldn’t force them to keep, if she dwelt on the amulet stuffed in a shoebox under her bed because she didn’t know what else to do with it), she would lose it all the same.

But what if.

It was entirely possible, wasn’t it? She herself had wondered about it, once or twice, before she’d set her rules into stone. Nathaniel was dead, nearly certainly, and that was sad, but at least there was a sense of the concrete there. Bartimaeus, however….

She needed to get to a pentacle.

  
  


Even as she got out the chalk, even as she painstakingly lowered herself to the ground, joints creaking, knees protesting, even as she lit candles and drew lines (as casual as she could, the bare bones of a summoning, both because she did not wish to constrain Bartimaeus, not now, not after what they had been through, and because she did not have the patience nor the energy for something more complex), Kitty wanted to yell at herself for what she was doing. This--it could only end in tears, her tears, it could only end in an empty pentacle opposite her own, in energy thrown into a useless pursuit that would throw her out of commision for days if she let it. It could only end in confirmation of what she already knew--surely, surely Bartimaeus was dead.

But didn’t she owe it to him to at least find out?

Steeling herself, trying to force every bit of her mind to hold no hope, no expectation (and failing, miserably, if she was going to tell herself the truth, but who was around to call her on it?) about what she might find on the other side of the call, Kitty spoke the words she barely remembered (it had only been a little over a year since she had last had cause to stand in a pentacle in a situation very much like this one, but how quickly the unused craft starts to leave your head, replaced by the new events in a world that her friends, resistance, magician, demon, all of them, had never seen) and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting.

She stood there for what felt like an eternity. Just when she had given up all hope, had resigned herself to her loneliness again, already telling herself to keep her chin up, because what did she  _ think _ would happen? at least she knew the truth now, at least there was no lingering ambiguity, something started to change.

The temperature of the room dropped fast.

Kitty swung around, searching for a open window or a draft that could be contributing to the effect, but no--in the other pentacle, already, there was a swirling, brewing storm, a column of smoke reeking of brimstone, fire lapping at the weak restraints she’d hardly bothered with. It recalled instantly the form Kitty had last seen him in, the last shape his essence had taken before it was one with Nathaniel’s, and she lost both of them forever.

Or maybe not.

When the smoke finally calmed into a controlled tempest, murky yellow eyes formed from somewhere deep within the shape. They opened slowly, Bartimaeus still showing off, a low roar of thunder permeating from everywhere and nowhere. Even in her shock, even recovering from about fifty different warring emotions within her, Kitty had to roll her eyes at this. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

The eyes finally focused on her, then--and widened.

“Oh. Well. It’s about time, isn’t it?”

The smoke died down then, the temperature of the room retreating back up to the only slightly uncomfortable warmth that Kitty had been grappling with before. Where the smoke had been, a humanoid shape was forming. Kitty couldn’t make it out.

She gaped. Not one for wasting valuable time, though, she forced her mouth closed and tilted her head, studying him. 

“He did it, then. He dismissed you.”

The humanoid fidgeted then, scraping its foot appendage along the floor and giving off the direct impression that it wasn’t quite meeting Kitty’s eye.

“Yeah, he did. Stupid prat.”

There was a distinct sense, just then, that Bartimaeus had failed to give his form a face just so that Kitty couldn’t read him. Not that she was entirely certain she would have been able to anyway (emotional intelligence had never quite been her area of expertise, much preferring that if someone had a problem, they told her directly, without all the fuss and equivocation), but the way the mannequin form slumped and hesitated, she could tell that there was a conflict inside Bartimaeus mirroring the one that she grappled with. 

Seeing that she wasn’t going to take pity on him and carry the conversation, Bartimaeus finally untied his tongue.

“Listen, Kitty, he wanted me to say… well, hello.” As he delivered the message, Kitty could have sworn that the vague outline of a person flickered into something more distinct, a little taller--yes, she was sure of it. For a second, Bartimaeus had taken Nathaniel’s form, and yet it was nothing like when he took Ptolemy’s--this form didn’t have the loving detail (the moles, she remembered, each one almost definitely in exactly the place they had appeared on a boy dead for millennia), the carefully studied quality of the Egyptian boy’s guise. Nathaniel, in contrast, looked a little hazy, a little rushed, bits and pieces seeming out of place or untrue to life. This was the first time he had taken that form, Kitty realized--there were no centuries of practice with which to perfect every little detail based on memory alone. He had never gotten to study Nathaniel like he must have Ptolemy, and now it was too late.

Just as quickly as the form had flickered into being, it flickered out again. When the dust settled, so to speak, Bartimaeus had resumed his most comfortable guise.

Kitty decided not to mention it. Neither one of them wanted to have that conversation right now--or at the very least, she decidedly did not.

Instead, she snorted. “Hello? That’s your big message?”

“Er… To be fair, there was quite a bit on his mind at the time. It was all very stressful and emotional--maybe you had to be there.”

“Maybe.” 

“May _ be.”  _ Bartimaeus hummed, rocking back and forth on Ptolemy’s feet. “How are things, then, Kitty? You’re looking… well.”

“I’m looking old. No need to sugar coat it.”

“Old, pah. Humans know nothing of old. You’re just--experienced.” He hesitated. “And your aura is radiant.”

For some unfathomable reason, this compliment was a blow to every one of Kitty’s senses at once. She stood, flushed to her bones, staring at Bartimaeus for an uncomfortably long moment--why was everything about this meeting so uncomfortable, one million things to say and not a single word between them to convey them?--before barking out a short laugh and looking away, scratching her neck self consciously.

“I’m sure you say that to all the old maids.”

“It’s quite a good line. Gets you farther than you might think.”

“Oh, not with me, it doesn’t.”

“You’ll come around.”

She rolled her eyes, smile creeping up on her face. It had been so long since she’d even had cause to smile like this (one year, three months, change), and the sensation was so shocking, she almost brought a hand to her face just to make sure it was real.

Bartimaeus casually kicked at the edges of the pentacle. Sparks flew up, little shocks, but nothing like last time (like that jab to the nethers that Kitty had _ never _ wanted to see), and he considered them.

“Hm. You know, this might be one of the shoddiest pentacles I’ve ever been invited into. I’m not even entirely sure this is holding me.”

Now it was Kitty’s turn to look away, embarrassed. “Well,” she said, trying to keep herself from gritting her teeth with the admission “I hadn’t planned on keeping you any longer than you wanted to stay around, really. In fact….”

Still not meeting Bartimaeus’ gaze, Kitty took a step forward, not only exiting the pentacle, but also dragging her toe through the chalk, voiding it of any power it might have been imbued with. When she darted her eyes up to his face again, it was with a challenge, but his own expression put all the fight out of her instantly.

Kitty didn’t think she had ever been regarded with such affection. For a moment, neither of them even moved, and Kitty decided that this was it, they were going to spend the rest of their lives--the rest of  _ her _ life, at least--just standing in that glorified closet, gaping stupidly at one another, filled with the overwhelming relief and pain of thinking yourself alone in the world and then finding you were wrong, but even before she could make her peace with this eventuality, Bartimaeus was stepping gingerly out of his own pentacle (still cautious, still wincing, and Kitty saw in that hundreds of lifetimes of mistreatment that time was never going to undo, and it broke her heart). For a few more seconds, they just looked at one another. It was alien, it was unheard of, it was strange. They were out of their depths.

Then Bartimaeus threw himself forward, and they were both flying, struck suddenly with the sense that gravity had released them, and it was all Kitty could do to wrap her arms around Bartimaeus and cling to that feeling. 

She wasn’t much for hugs, but this once, she decided to allow it.

Pressed into her shoulder, Bartimaeus squeezed her tighter, as tight as her creaking bones would allow for. She squeezed back, and hanging there in the air, spinning lazy circles by virtue of Bartimaeus’ will or perhaps just a convenient anomaly from the universe, sent just in time to capture them both up in the moment, Kitty found contentment for the first time in one year, three months, and seven days.

If she was going to be honest with herself, it might have been the first time in a long time before that, too.

  
  


That first reunion, sticky with emotions and intimate and a little bit overwhelming, didn’t last much longer than that--there was too much to say, and too many inhibitions in between the spaces the words couldn’t fill. It was odd, Kitty mused later, that she had spent three years desperately learning everything she could about the djinn, that one meeting with him had knocked her off the course of her life, that she had gone so far to connect with him in his own territory, in that vast incomprehensible nightmare that she had never quite come to terms with, and yet when it came down to it, she didn’t really know him. She knew his history, or at least fragments of it. She knew his kindness. 

They just hadn’t ever really, well, talked.

Standing there, swaying in the storage room, it wasn’t quite the ideal time to start. That was okay, though--she had all the time in the world, now, all the time she wanted, to remedy that, and so did he. As a parting gesture, Kitty got permission to summon him whenever she wanted (there was an unspoken hope, there, for both of them, a future that Bartimaeus had never gotten to contemplate before, always realizing his devotion when the curtains were already closing), and that was that.

She waited about a week, the first time, before summoning him again, just to make sure that his essence could fully heal. No matter how little damage she had done in the short time that she had drawn him out, Kitty wanted to make sure that she made up for it, wanted to make sure that she wasn’t falling into the traps of the old order, the magicians before her, using him for her own purposes and wasting his essence away.

When she told him this on their next meeting, the two of them strolling through a garden, soaking in the sun and each other’s company, he teased her mercilessly for it. This was the response that one had to kindness, Kitty supposed, when one was unused to receiving it. 

She poured the bag of popcorn she’d been carrying out over his head. Two seconds later, she caught just enough of a devious smile to start protesting before she was knocked off her feet, wrestled mercilessly into a bush. He took great care not to hurt her in the process (it didn’t even occur to her to be scared that he might, so great was her trust in him--after all, once you had entrusted the very soul in your body to someone, the outside casing seemed petty in comparison), but it was still a challenge that Kitty wasn’t about to back down from, and she was halfway through rubbing dirt in his hair when the hilarity of the situation hit her, mixing with the genuine happiness circulating within her very veins, and she bent over in peals of laughter so strong that Bartimaeus had to help her to her feet, laughing too, though at her or with her, she couldn’t tell.

Kitty had never felt like this. She had never had the occasion to be so carefree, so weightless. Always there had been some greater responsibility, some weight on her shoulders, but now all of that was gone, and she was free--for the first time in her life, Kitty went through her days thinking that there was nothing in the world that she would rather be doing than what she was in that moment. Not all of this was due to Bartimaeus, of course… but it wasn’t exactly _ not  _ because of him, either. 

As stupid as it sounded to say of a 5000+ year old immortal being when she had yet to hit 20, he made her feel younger. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but when Bartimaeus was around, her joints bothered her a little less, her body let her go a little further than it otherwise would. She began to summon him more frequently, though with the same careful awareness of his essence, of the world’s effect on him--she, more than any human on Earth, could understand how devastating being ripped from that realm felt, and the idea that he had to undergo that with some degree of frequency just to talk to her, and that he was  _ okay _ with this, or at least appeared to be, was incomprehensible to her.

And just as she understood him, Kitty found, he understood  _ her. _ Since coming back from the Other Place, Kitty had never felt quite like she belonged among others. Never quite enough, never quite human, and this feeling never coming in a way or from an angle that she could explain. It would just overtake her sometimes, when she was sitting in on a parliamentary meeting ensuring that the idiots didn’t ruin the fledgling new order, or when she was passed or smiled at on the street, or even when she stood in line with armfuls of cheap commodities at the supermarket--this feeling that she was on a wavelength no one around her could hear. Before she had stepped back into her pentacle, Kitty assumed that the only people who had a chance in hell at understanding her were dead and gone, and so she had resigned herself to a lifetime of otherness, not quite a part of the pack she’d once fought in. 

With Bartimaeus, there was none of that. She felt whole, and that was enough.

So she would summon him, and for awhile they would wander through London; some days he came with her to run her errands, some days they took part in touristy attractions that both of them scoffed at just to feel a part of the city, but most days they took to the streets. Bartimaeus was in his element, on Earth, when he was given access to nature, away from the ironwork and diesel fumes of the urban sprawl, and increasingly, Kitty had felt confined by the same fixtures, eager to stretch her protesting legs and forget her age for a moment. There weren’t many places to go in London that truly escaped it, of course, but they managed well enough. A garden here, a greenhouse there, the occasional trail. She had taken him, once, to the memorial they’d constructed for Nathaniel (the plaque read “John Mandrake,” and when Kitty saw it, she was always deliriously tempted to deface it, but who would that help, now, and who would benefit), but he wasn’t there, in that place, and neither of them liked to dwell to much on what they couldn’t change, so by unspoken agreement, that was one place they avoided on their subsequent visits. 

When Kitty had the time, they would leave the city entirely and walk around the countryside, or the coast. Increasingly, though, it wasn’t quite enough. Sitting with her toes in the sand, staring at the ocean, Kitty rested her chin on her arms and hummed.

“I want to see it.”

“It,” he repeated, turning to regard her.

“The world. All of it. Everything.” She splayed her hands across the sky, ignoring the way they shook just a bit as she did so. “All of it, Bartimaeus. Nothing is keeping me here anymore, is it? I want to see what you’ve seen.”

He was quiet for a moment, setting Ptolemy’s warm eyes out on that same ocean, deep in memory or contemplation or both. Finally, he shrugged.

“Then see it.”

  
  


Incredibly, she does.

Kitty doesn’t have much, but she has enough savings to deplete that she can make it out to sea, and since she’s not concerned with coming back, the rent she saves on her shitty apartment seals the decision. A little over a month after that day on the beach, Kitty sets off with a single backpack for her clothes and a stick of chalk stuffed between them, ready to leave behind the country that had given her grief throughout her life, that she had lived to see fall and would live to see rebuilt. As she walked out of London, onto the dock of the first ship she’d come across that was willing to give her passage to mainland Europe, she did not look back.

In each city Kitty reaches, her first move is to summon Bartimaeus to her, because as much as he glorified his home with his words, there was always an edge of devotion to the places he would build up in his stories (many of which he would have her believe he had built literally, too, and single handedly at that), places of the Earth, places of humans that he was unapologetically wistful for. She wanted to see the world with him, to picture him as he had been in these places when they were new. 

With each pentacle that she drew, Kitty tested the limits of how bare-bones she could make the summoning without mucking it up entirely. She drew pentacles that were barely more than the circle and the star, only the most essential symbols drawn, as casually as she could draw them. Some of these attempts, she was sure, were so flimsy that he could have ignored them entirely if he wished, and if he did, well, Kitty told herself that she wouldn’t begrudge him for it, he was under no obligation to come to her, not when this world tore at his essence and confined his eternal nature as it did, but these reassurances never held any clout, anyway. She would complete the summoning, whispering  _ “Bartimaeus” _ with a growing reverence, and he always, always came.

They saw the nearest things first. Paris. Berlin. Amsterdam. Bartimaeus rolled his eyes at these destinations, though, once they went out on the streets, he had no shortage of little things to point out, places that he swore he saw blown up when he’d last been summoned in the area, bakeries that had been open for decades and had housed all sorts of nightmares back in the early 1940’s.  

“You just don’t like these cities because you didn’t build them,” Kitty teased him one day. “No great personal accomplishment to brag about.”

He scoffed. “Hardly. These European cities--there’s just… no history. Now, take me to Mesopotamia, and there’s a different story.  _ They _ know culture.”

Kitty was eager enough to see Mesopotamia, so her objections were half hearted. The thing was, though, that she was eager to see  _ everything, _ every city, forest, and body of water in the world, and she was having a hard time picking and choosing which to prioritize. 

“Sometimes,” Bartimaeus huffed, exasperated “I swear that if you had it your way, we would spend whole days walking through sewers just because the architecture caught your fancy.”

“Well, now that you mention it.”

At each destination, Bartimaeus and Kitty became a little more comfortable, a little more familiar. They had a routine, a fixed call and response when she summoned him: greetings, quips about how terribly long it’s been since they last saw each other, and then the announcement of which site they were seeing that particular week. When they walked down the street, Bartimaeus would sometimes throw his arm over her shoulder on a whim, and on a whim, Kitty would let him. Like Britain’s government, like this friendship, it was something entirely new; new for them both, new for the world.

In Prague, Bartimaeus traded out his usual guise of Ptolemy for Nathaniel’s less familiar face--Nathaniel as he looked when he died, she can see, his cropped hair and tired eyes, skinny frame towering over her. Neither of them said anything as he did it. Kitty simply examined his features, somewhat of a morbid curiosity taking over as she watched him rearrange little things about Nathaniel as his memory worked to recall the features that had already faded to naught in Kitty’s mind. That was a human privilege, she assumed, to forget. Bartimaeus, all of the spirits, really, didn’t have that luxury. Their memories would outlast everything that Kitty would ever know.

When the freckles and stray hairs of Nathaniel’s face stopped swimming around, they resumed their walk. Halfway down the street, she took his hand, and still, neither of them mentioned it. They walked in silence for a while, but a comfortable one, and when Kitty started feeling her hunger in a persistent enough way that she couldn’t ignore it, she got a pretzel and let him narrate the fall of the city as she ate it--intersped, here and there, with his more recent adventures in Prague, including a tour of a wrecked building that he swore he flew through as a wrecking ball of stone. Kitty hasn’t seen a city yet that she’s disliked, but what makes her love, really _ love, _ these monuments to human creation, is the stories that Bartimaeus can tell about them, the way he always seems to have seen something worth knowing.

Inwardly, she found herself wondering at night if she would be falling in love with the world she was seeing only then, even after living in it for the last 19 years of her life, quite as thoroughly if she had taken off to see it on her own. It’s hardly a question; of course not. In a way, she was growing as attached to Bartimaeus as she had these flying cathedrals and the twisting, winding streets of these cities, and there was no denying it. That was alright; she could tell that he felt the depth of their bond as strongly as she did. There was a certain beauty in being loved.

Their last night in Prague, Kitty and Bartimaeus sat out on a rooftop they didn’t strictly have access to. The lights of the city made the stars dim, but Kitty still pointed out the ones she could see, and beside her, Bartimaeus hugged his knees (Nathaniel’s knees) to his chest and listened to her.

The two of them fell into a lull, for a bit. Bartimaeus was the one to break it.

“Do you ever wish,” he started, before clamping his mouth shut again. 

Kitty frowned. “Wish what?”

“Do you ever wish that Nathaniel was the one who got out of the whole Glass Palace business? That you were seeing the world with him right now, none of this summoning in every hotel room business, just… two human beings taking in their own world for the first time, together?”

“What’s this about? You know, I never pegged you as the insecure type.”

“It’s not that, just--I’ve been thinking.”

“First time for everything.”

“Don’t make me push you off this roof. You think I won’t do it because you’re fragile these days, don’t you, but I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

Kitty grinned, but patted his back. “I’m sure you wouldn't. You’re a very ferocious djinni, Bartimaeus.”

“Don’t you forget it. Anyway, it’s the city, I think. ‘S got my head all mixed up, I keep thinking about what he would think of these things.  _ Ugh. _ You might think I would have gotten used to death after five thousand years.”

Kitty didn’t say anything for a few moments, staring up at the sky again. 

“You know, I never really knew him. Not like you did. The Nathaniel I knew in those last few hours before the end--that was a boy I would have liked to get to know better, I think. One way or another. But would I rather he was here than you? No. There’s nothing I would trade for these past few weeks, Bartimaeus. You’ve shown me more than I ever thought I could learn.”

Bartimaeus froze, searching Kitty’s face for some trace of insincerity, and found none. When he regained the ability to move again, it was to throw himself at her in a hug so aggressive that he nearly made good on his threat to push her over the edge, and buried his head in her shoulder. 

If you asked him, he would tell you that he couldn’t be crying, because that isn’t something that djinn do, and maybe that would be fair enough. If you asked Kitty, though, she would cite her soaked collar as evidence to the contrary, may it please the court. In a way, maybe, they were both telling the truth.

“Aw, you big baby, you don’t have to cry. I couldn’t go on this trip with anyone but you--who else knows all the history?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The two of them spent the rest of the night intertwined like that, taking comfort from one another, and above them the stars danced by.

 

Bartimaeus first knew that he was in love, truly, irrevocably, in love, with Kitty Jones for the first time when he saw her standing in the waters of the Nile, pants rolled up to her knees (not that it stopped the hem of them from getting soaked through, but it was the thought that counted), grey hair somehow both tied up and flying loosely around her face. He had taken the form of Ptolemy again, and had shown her Alexandria with the greatest care she had seen him give to a city yet, and as they continued their trek across the country, it felt wrong--disrespectful--to take anyone else’s form. He couldn’t. Not here.

Old love, old pain, still ached deep within his essence as relentlessly as the new. Ptolemy was not Nathaniel, or Kitty, but they were both parts of him, in a way. More than anything, Ptolemy was a part of Bartimaeus, or a hole missing from him that he thought he could never fill again.

That hole… well, it isn’t filled, not exactly, because she’s so different, so brash, so fierce, where Ptolemy hadn’t been, shining in one million different ways and each of them unique to her, but it’s not so raw anymore, either, because when his mind drifts to love, it’s no longer entirely in past tense.

He loves Kitty. 

_ Loves _ her.

That had been true even before he’d been ready to go out in a blaze of glory with Nathaniel. Ever since he’d seen her mold herself into a vaguely humanoid bobblehead made from the essence of every spirit in creation swirling together with her own, he had loved her, in much the same way as he loved Ptolemy. Devotion, would probably be the best word for it. But that love, the only one he’d ever truly known--only hours later, he felt something new, realizing that he could love Nathaniel, right as he lost him. That wasn’t quite the same, wasn’t the self-sacrifice, let-me-die-for-you love that Bartimaeus had always laughed at, thumbed his nose at, felt deeply all the same. 

This was something different entirely. Love, undoubtedly, but perhaps more physical, more desperate. Bartimaeus’ essence was consumed with fire, with something new, because this was--like everything he had done with Kitty since she summoned him again, this was new, unprecedented. He had never loved this deeply when the object of his affection was still around to receive it. Didn’t know how to give it, honestly, and that blot in his knowledge bothered him more than he wanted to let on. It was new, electric, and terrifying in a way that was uncommon for a being who had been around since before the Pharaohs. For the first time in a long time, he had no fucking clue what he was doing.

Standing right there among the reeds, his feet squishing in mud, Bartimaeus felt his world change again; watched helplessly as it condensed from eternity down into one single point: her.

He was in so much trouble. 

  
  


After the Near East, Kitty was struck by the desire to see the New World in all of its untamed glory, to compare the horrible wilderness of Nathaniel’s war pamphlets with Bartimaeus’ fond recollection of the continent. Their last night in Jerusalem, she found a boat shipping out of Spain in a week and heading for Boston that was willing to give her passage, and settled, content, back into her rented bed for a while. Bartimaeus sat beside her on the comforter. 

He seemed distracted.

“Bartimaeus.”

“Hmmm?”

“You’ve been clicking that pen for the last ten minutes.”

He looked down, as if in disbelief that such a pen even existed, and upon receiving confirmation that it did, he put it down delicately on the bedside table, sitting on his hands and looking faintly embarrassed.

“Was I? Didn’t notice. Funny things, pens.”

Kitty had never seen Bartimaeus like this before, and couldn’t place the energy he was exuding as nervous or preoccupied or neither, and couldn’t fathom what cause he would have to be either, even if he was. 

She had no time for bullshit.

“Bartimaeus, what is it?”

“What?”

“What is it? You’re acting strange. What’s wrong with you?”

Bartimaeus avoided her gaze for a few more seconds before finally caving. All in all, he held out on her longer than she was expecting him to.

“I was just thinking… well, you don’t have to dismiss me every time you switch cities, you know.” 

“Don’t you  _ want _ to be back in the Other Place?”

“Well, yes, theoretically, but a day or two--it doesn’t make so much of a difference in the pain. If you ever got, I don’t know, lonely, on the journey, I wouldn’t mind it so much to stick around. For your sake.”

The thought had occurred to Bartimaeus, recently, that he might like to spend a day on a train with Kitty, just watching her--he was sure that she would fall asleep on his shoulder and shove him off when he teased her for it, but also that she would watch the landscape going by outside the windows with a kind of childlike wonder, the same wonder she wore without shame when they walked through the sites of old battles and temples and invention. As soon as the thought had come into his head, it consumed him, drowned him entirely, until he was singularly fixated on it. 

Hence, the pen clicking.

He didn’t want to examine too closely the preoccupation he had with that thought, the fantasy of one day of domestic coexistence not much different from the coexistence he was already enjoying. They spent most of their days together, now. He had no real reason to crave that extra bit of contact, those extra hours that he didn’t have, except that he had tasted her company and was greedy for it. Every second was worth any pain it might cause, because it would be a second with her.

She eyed him suspiciously. 

“This isn’t about--I don’t know, you thinking that I’m defenceless without you, is it?”

Because this was a less embarrassing admission to make than telling her that he simply wanted to be around her as much as she would let him, Bartimaeus lapsed into a silence that he knew she would take as confirmation. This earned him a punch to the arm. It was worth it.

“Look, if anyone is in danger, it’s the fool who would be stupid enough to mess with  _ you. _ I just want to be there to make sure you don’t rack up too many felony charges when you kill some idiot and dump him in international waters.”

Oh, the boat trip. That was another thing. Kitty had never been on the ocean before, not like she would be on the trip across the Atlantic, and some part of Bartimaeus longed to see it, to catalogue her amazement as the spray blew through her hair and keep the memory of it deep within him. It was Nathaniel, he thought, who gave him this panic. He had seen a lot of the boy, over the course of their time together, but the memories of Nathaniel  _ happy _ were far and few between, to the point that something so simple as smiling in his form seemed categorically wrong. Going through every interaction with Kitty hyper aware of her humanity, her fragility, Bartimaeus felt rushed with the compulsion to hoard every good memory of Kitty that he could, as fast as he could. Eventually, she would wilt away like Ptolemy, like Nathaniel, and he would be alone again, summoned back and back until his essence finally wore away into grit. 

Kitty gave him another scrutinous once over, but finally let the subject go with a distracted nonchalance. Under her skin, there was a certain alarm, but she did her best to ignore it.

“Whatever you say. But no, Bartimaeus, I don’t need a bodyguard, and you need to recuperate. Both of us will be fine on our own for a little while, don’t you think? We’ve lasted this long.”

At this statement, Bartimaeus’ mind welled up with objections that he couldn’t quite mash down. Being on his own again was the  _ problem, _ because it was an eventuality, a certainty, one that he didn’t want to face, and especially not soon. Expressing this sentiment would do no one any good, though--he’d come off as irrational at best, and possibly give away more than he wanted to at worst--so Bartimaeus, for once in his life, held his tongue.

“Listen, how about I dismiss you now, and call you back once I get to Boston?”

“Kitty--”

It was too late. She was already speaking the dismissal. Trying his hardest not to feel brushed over (not her intent, never her intent, he was certain, but damn if it didn’t feel that way), Bartimaeus let go of his hold on her world and got lost in the sweet oblivion of his own. As he went, he watched wistfully as she went through the final motions of the dismissal, and if part of him longed for the cold spray of the sea over the beloved wholeness that he was hurtling toward, well, who was around to know?


End file.
